megabytes and gigabytes

Can someone tell me how many megabytes are there are in one gigabyte? Thank you very much abm

 

I have my students ask me that all the time. A gigabyte is 1000 times larger than a megabyte. Mega means million and giga means billion.

So there are 1000 megabytes in a gigabyte

 

Sorry Ranger

Because computers use binary rather than decimal a kilo is 1024, a mega is 1024 kilos and a giga is 1024 megas. In answer to ABM's post there are 1024 Megabytes in a Gigabyte.

 

My Bad, but High School students like round numbers so for them I'll use my explination

 

What a woos, rather than actually teaching you take the easy option

(please understand I am joking).

 

Of course I do, but now I have to look things up.

Giga does refer to 10 raised to the 9th power. But when taking about binary, the term giga refers to 2 raise to the 30th power (need to look this one up). Now you've got me curious. Look what you started.

 

It's a good question, abm.

Generally "kilo" means 1,000x and "mega" means 1,000,000x. So there would be 1,000 kilo-anything in a mega-something.

However, for technical reasons it's more convenient to count computer memory in multiples of 1024 (because 1024 is a power of two). So for convenience we use "kilo" to mean 1,024x and "mega" to mean 1,048,576x (that's 1024x1024) when we're talking about kilobytes and megabytes.

That is, there are 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte. Similarly there are 1024 megabytes in a gigabyte (1 073 741 824 bytes, just a tad over a billion bytes).

To avoid confusion, some computer geeks prefer the terms "kibi ", "mebi ", "gibi" and so forth when referring to multiples of 1024.

There's a good article at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megabyte

 

Excellent Info, thanx. I also found this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

 

Hi TonyT,

Just to throw a little gasoline on the fire, you're partially correct. A 100GB drive is 100 GB because the Mfg.'s measure it in base 10. MS measures it in base 8 (or something like that); hence, a 100 GB drive is 100GB, it's just that MS only "sees" it as being 90 to 99GB.

Or, Mfg.'s measure in Decimal, and MS measures in Binary.

That's why you'll see drives advertised as 320GB because mfg.'s got tired of all the calls as to why their drive wasn't as big as expected. There is, and you can, put 320 GB of info on the drive, even though MS says there's less. <source: Maxtor, c. 1998>

p.s. I still haven't amended the .bat program you gave me. When friends come over and I click the icon and hit the spacebar a couple of times to delete the cookies, history, etc., they're very impressed.

 

I'd really like more info on your source please. This is interesting. Why would one use base 8???. Because 2^3 is equal to 8, it is possible to use 8. For example giga in binary is 2^30 which is equal to 8^10.

But I would like to know more, can you provide a link please.

 

Hi Ranger SVO,

The most important part of my post that I should have italicized and put in bold was: or something like that.

Also, the "c. 1998 ". I'd just bought one of the new, massive 20GB HDDs and I noticed that what the box said and what Windows said were two different things. So, I called and was informed by one of the techs at Maxtor about the different ways a HDD is measured.

And, before I posted I called Maxtor (Seagate) again to see if my notes were correct and he told me, "Yes, it is Base something (although he didn't remember from my last call which it was ). He said the easiest way to remember it is like I wrote, Decimal vs. Binary.

Short answer (too late for that) is, no, I don't know of a website. Back in '98 though (when my braim was working) I tried the different Bases and found out what was what "” although I do not remember which it was. I do remember that BaseX gave me the Maxtor 20GB and BaseY gave me the Microsoft number.